A Former Prodigy Grows Up
This article originally appeared in Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper, on October 14, 2003.
by Colin Eatock
On a fine September evening, a near-capacity audience has turned out for the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra’s season-opening program. This is no ordinary concert – the guest artist is none other than Midori, and this city in upstate New York has been plastered with posters advertising her appearance.
She’s a small woman, but she fills the hall with her broad smile as she enters from the wings in a pale blue and silver dress, clutching her 1734 Guarnerius violin. Yet as soon as she puts bow to string, the smile vanishes, and she no longer seems to notice her audience at all. Rather, her performance becomes an intense dance, as she sways, crouches and swerves on stage, pouring forth Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor (the same piece she’ll perform tonight and Friday with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra). Her interpretation is subtle, and her tone is sweet – quite unlike some of the aggressive whiz-kids playing these days.
But Midori is no longer a kid: she’s 31 – a fact that may astonish fans who think of her as permanently 11 years old. That was her age when the world first came to know her, 20 years ago: a cute, chipmunk-cheeked slip of a girl who could play like a seasoned virtuoso. So powerful was the impression that she made that her name was absorbed into the lexicon of classical music. For the last two decades, every prodigious violinist to come along – especially if female and Asian – has been touted as “the next Midori.”
The day after the Syracuse concert, Midori is again all smiles, in an interview at her sparsely furnished flat on New York City’s West Side. These days, the events of her life are fresh in her mind: she’s just finished writing her memoirs (to be published in Germany next year). Sitting on a small Japanese stool, she pets one of her two dogs and talks easily about her personal history and goals.
“I don’t want to just simply play,” she asserts. “I like to think of ways that will make the experience of the listeners more substantial. And I like to think of different ways of doing this.” Indeed, in the last decade she has devoted much time to an array of special projects, often aimed at young people and intended to take her music beyond traditional concert-settings. Among these are “Midori and Friends,” a music-education program for inner-city children in New York; “Music Sharing,” a similar organization she established in her native Japan; and her “On Location” residency with the Los Angeles Philharmonic last year that took her into the city’s neighbourhoods.
Midori’s interest in children goes beyond charitable do-goodism: she has a degree in psychology from New York University, and she’s currently writing a Master’s thesis on children with physical pain. It’s a subject close to her heart: her own childhood was not without its own kind of pain.
Midori was born in Osaka, Japan, in 1971, into a musical family. At the age of four, her grandmother gave her a miniature violin, and three years later she gave her first recital, playing a virtuosic Paganini Caprice. When she was 11, she moved with her mother to New York to study with Dorothy DeLay, the Grande Dame of American violin teachers. (In the early 1980s she also stopped using her surname – Goto – professionally, around the time of her parents’ divorce.)
In the United States she astounded the classical-music establishment: the renowned violinist Isaac Stern declared her the greatest prodigy he’d ever heard, and New York Philharmonic conductor Zubin Mehta booked her for a special New Year’s Eve concert. Debuts in Philadelphia, Cleveland, Toronto, Montreal and other cities soon followed. In 1986, when she played at the Tanglewood Music Festival under the baton of Leonard Bernstein, the effusive maestro knelt down and kissed her hand.
However, success came at a price. As her teenaged years progressed, Midori, in many respects, didn’t. Commenting on her arrested development, critic Tim Page of The Washington Post wrote: “Long after it was appropriate, she still dressed in little-girl Popsicle colours and came across as an eternal moppet. She talked incessantly about Snoopy, and her body language – when she wasn’t playing the violin – was that of a child, one well aware of her Liliputian charm.”
In an interview last year with The Christian Science Monitor, Midori hinted at an adolescence repressed by an image-conscious music business. “They would tell me things like, `You have to say you like classical music, you never listen to anything else,’” she remarked, claiming she was told to “play the violin and remain silent.” At the age of 22, ongoing medical problems reached a crisis-point, and she cancelled all her engagements for a six-month period. The press discreetly reported that she had a “digestive disorder.”
“I was severely anorexic,” she states candidly. “That wasn’t my only experience in the hospital – but it was the longest, and that was the first time I was given the official diagnosis.” Faced with a life-threatening illness, Midori was forced to look at her future. “It’s pretty difficult not to think about it when you’re in the hospital, on the eating disorder ward,” she reflects – adding, with a laugh, “And it’s a little bit difficult, if you’re in the hospital, to concertize!”
Two years later she enrolled at NYU and soon became so interested in psychology that she considered retiring from the stage. “Until then I never consciously chose music as my career,” she explains. “So I was trying to decide between psychology and music – and, had I gone into psychology, I might have given up performing. It was good to have had that opportunity to contemplate – and it wasn’t easy.” And so the violinist who was a veteran of the international concert circuit while still in her teens decided – in her mid-20s – to be a professional musician.
Psychology remains a strong interest, and her studies have included work with prodigious children. “It’s still a very under-studied area,” she observes, “and everyone grows up in a different way. We may have differences as children, but those differences often become equalized again in the adult world. And there are prodigies who become gifted adults.”
Then again, there are also prodigies who become tragic adults. Mozart’s career floundered when he grew up and could no longer be marketed as a boy genius. His fortunes never really recovered, and he died in poverty at the age of 35. More recently, Glenn Gould – Canada’s most celebrated pianist – was, at the time his death in 1982, a sadly self-isolated hypochondriac. By comparison, prodigies who lose their exceptional talents and become ordinary people seem fortunate.
Happily, Midori seems to enjoy the best of both worlds: an esteemed artist, she comes across as normal enough – even though she’s had to strive for her normalcy, much as other people would have to strive to be exceptional. She reads, she teaches, she enjoys jazz and folk music, she likes art and she even cooks. Yet for all her challenges growing up, she’s firmly non-judgmental about her formative years.
“I’m not so naïve as to say that I had a happy childhood or an unhappy childhood,” she says, insisting that she doesn’t think about life in “what if” terms. “I don’t say, what if I did this differently? Or what if I had not done that? I think of myself as the outcome of what I’ve experienced. With just one different experience I would be a different person. And I don’t know that person.”
© Colin Eatock 2003
by Colin Eatock
On a fine September evening, a near-capacity audience has turned out for the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra’s season-opening program. This is no ordinary concert – the guest artist is none other than Midori, and this city in upstate New York has been plastered with posters advertising her appearance.
She’s a small woman, but she fills the hall with her broad smile as she enters from the wings in a pale blue and silver dress, clutching her 1734 Guarnerius violin. Yet as soon as she puts bow to string, the smile vanishes, and she no longer seems to notice her audience at all. Rather, her performance becomes an intense dance, as she sways, crouches and swerves on stage, pouring forth Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor (the same piece she’ll perform tonight and Friday with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra). Her interpretation is subtle, and her tone is sweet – quite unlike some of the aggressive whiz-kids playing these days.
But Midori is no longer a kid: she’s 31 – a fact that may astonish fans who think of her as permanently 11 years old. That was her age when the world first came to know her, 20 years ago: a cute, chipmunk-cheeked slip of a girl who could play like a seasoned virtuoso. So powerful was the impression that she made that her name was absorbed into the lexicon of classical music. For the last two decades, every prodigious violinist to come along – especially if female and Asian – has been touted as “the next Midori.”
The day after the Syracuse concert, Midori is again all smiles, in an interview at her sparsely furnished flat on New York City’s West Side. These days, the events of her life are fresh in her mind: she’s just finished writing her memoirs (to be published in Germany next year). Sitting on a small Japanese stool, she pets one of her two dogs and talks easily about her personal history and goals.
“I don’t want to just simply play,” she asserts. “I like to think of ways that will make the experience of the listeners more substantial. And I like to think of different ways of doing this.” Indeed, in the last decade she has devoted much time to an array of special projects, often aimed at young people and intended to take her music beyond traditional concert-settings. Among these are “Midori and Friends,” a music-education program for inner-city children in New York; “Music Sharing,” a similar organization she established in her native Japan; and her “On Location” residency with the Los Angeles Philharmonic last year that took her into the city’s neighbourhoods.
Midori’s interest in children goes beyond charitable do-goodism: she has a degree in psychology from New York University, and she’s currently writing a Master’s thesis on children with physical pain. It’s a subject close to her heart: her own childhood was not without its own kind of pain.
Midori was born in Osaka, Japan, in 1971, into a musical family. At the age of four, her grandmother gave her a miniature violin, and three years later she gave her first recital, playing a virtuosic Paganini Caprice. When she was 11, she moved with her mother to New York to study with Dorothy DeLay, the Grande Dame of American violin teachers. (In the early 1980s she also stopped using her surname – Goto – professionally, around the time of her parents’ divorce.)
In the United States she astounded the classical-music establishment: the renowned violinist Isaac Stern declared her the greatest prodigy he’d ever heard, and New York Philharmonic conductor Zubin Mehta booked her for a special New Year’s Eve concert. Debuts in Philadelphia, Cleveland, Toronto, Montreal and other cities soon followed. In 1986, when she played at the Tanglewood Music Festival under the baton of Leonard Bernstein, the effusive maestro knelt down and kissed her hand.
However, success came at a price. As her teenaged years progressed, Midori, in many respects, didn’t. Commenting on her arrested development, critic Tim Page of The Washington Post wrote: “Long after it was appropriate, she still dressed in little-girl Popsicle colours and came across as an eternal moppet. She talked incessantly about Snoopy, and her body language – when she wasn’t playing the violin – was that of a child, one well aware of her Liliputian charm.”
In an interview last year with The Christian Science Monitor, Midori hinted at an adolescence repressed by an image-conscious music business. “They would tell me things like, `You have to say you like classical music, you never listen to anything else,’” she remarked, claiming she was told to “play the violin and remain silent.” At the age of 22, ongoing medical problems reached a crisis-point, and she cancelled all her engagements for a six-month period. The press discreetly reported that she had a “digestive disorder.”
“I was severely anorexic,” she states candidly. “That wasn’t my only experience in the hospital – but it was the longest, and that was the first time I was given the official diagnosis.” Faced with a life-threatening illness, Midori was forced to look at her future. “It’s pretty difficult not to think about it when you’re in the hospital, on the eating disorder ward,” she reflects – adding, with a laugh, “And it’s a little bit difficult, if you’re in the hospital, to concertize!”
Two years later she enrolled at NYU and soon became so interested in psychology that she considered retiring from the stage. “Until then I never consciously chose music as my career,” she explains. “So I was trying to decide between psychology and music – and, had I gone into psychology, I might have given up performing. It was good to have had that opportunity to contemplate – and it wasn’t easy.” And so the violinist who was a veteran of the international concert circuit while still in her teens decided – in her mid-20s – to be a professional musician.
Psychology remains a strong interest, and her studies have included work with prodigious children. “It’s still a very under-studied area,” she observes, “and everyone grows up in a different way. We may have differences as children, but those differences often become equalized again in the adult world. And there are prodigies who become gifted adults.”
Then again, there are also prodigies who become tragic adults. Mozart’s career floundered when he grew up and could no longer be marketed as a boy genius. His fortunes never really recovered, and he died in poverty at the age of 35. More recently, Glenn Gould – Canada’s most celebrated pianist – was, at the time his death in 1982, a sadly self-isolated hypochondriac. By comparison, prodigies who lose their exceptional talents and become ordinary people seem fortunate.
Happily, Midori seems to enjoy the best of both worlds: an esteemed artist, she comes across as normal enough – even though she’s had to strive for her normalcy, much as other people would have to strive to be exceptional. She reads, she teaches, she enjoys jazz and folk music, she likes art and she even cooks. Yet for all her challenges growing up, she’s firmly non-judgmental about her formative years.
“I’m not so naïve as to say that I had a happy childhood or an unhappy childhood,” she says, insisting that she doesn’t think about life in “what if” terms. “I don’t say, what if I did this differently? Or what if I had not done that? I think of myself as the outcome of what I’ve experienced. With just one different experience I would be a different person. And I don’t know that person.”
© Colin Eatock 2003
